The neighborhood I live in here in Chicago, well let’s just say it’s “up and coming” and it’s been “up and coming” for pretty much the entire 7 years that I’ve lived here.  During those years, it’s definitely been getting better and this year huge strides have been made with great new bars, restaurants and shops going in nearby including an upscale toy store!  The owner of the new toy store *Play, asked for my help picking out games for their target age group (8 and under).  Trying to pick out stuff that is fun and unique, one of the games I suggested was Chicken Cha Cha Cha – another game in the “Chicken Family of Zoch” which includes the previously reviewed Pickomino (see here).

Now, Chicken Cha Cha Cha isn’t the easiest game to find (it’s being re-released in October), and with a $30+ price tag it makes it even harder to cough up the money to buy it before trying it but I really thought it was a great purchase.  The game’s been around since 1998 and it was invented by Klaus Zoch (hence the “Chicken Family of Zoch”).  Unlike Pickomino, Chicken Cha Cha Cha is aimed at a younger crowd – 4 and up.  The game is simple, each player gets a beautiful wooden chicken with one tail feather that is placed on an egg shaped tile that is one of 24 laid out in a circle.  (Eggs, laid…get it?)  Inside the circle there are 12 octagonal tiles scattered about face down.  On your turn, you look at the egg space in front of you and try to flip over the tile in the middle that has the matching image.  Obviously in the beginning it’s all guessing, but as you get going it’s a great memory game!  If you flip a matching tile, you “cha cha” your chicken one space forward and your turn continues until you don’t flip over a matching tile.

The point of the game is to collect all of your opponents tail feathers.  To do that, you must catch up to, and then jump over another player.  After which you collect ALL of their tail feathers.  If the game has just started, they may only have their own feather but as things get going they could have collected a tail feather or two already.

Chicken Cha Cha Cha is definitely a fun twist on classic memory with exciting head-to-head play.  And while the $30 or more price tag is really steep for a kid’s game, it’s one that adults can definitely enjoy – even without the kids!  I also have to say that this game is amazingly well made.  The tiles are really thick and durable and the wooden chickens are something you won’t find in games at Target or Wal-Mart for sure

Chicken Cha Cha Cha Stats:

$30-$45 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble.com,  FunAgainGames.com
2-4 players
15-20 minutes
Ages 4 and up

This review of Word on the Street is SERIOUSLY over due and it’s all because one of my favorite playtesters doesn’t like the game.  Why?  Because I always annihilate him when the two of us play.  Heh heh heh.  Seriously though, Word on the Street is a great game for word game geeks.  In fact, it just won a Mensa award this year!  (congrats!)

The game is essentially a “tug of war” with letters.  There are 17 consonant tiles placed in a line down the center of the board, which is the “median” of the street.  On a turn you flip a category card and have 30 seconds to think of a word within that category that includes consonant tiles still on the board.  (Vowels are freebies)  For each letter in your word, you move that consonant tile one space closer to your “curb.”  Once a tile is moved off the board it’s yours to keep.  The first team to collect eight tiles wins the game.  It’s really an easy concept to grasp after playing one round.  I even helped the wonderful folks at Out of the Box demo the game to a buyer during Toy Fair.

Also at Toy Fair got to have dinner with a bunch of brilliant inventors, including the inventor of Word on the Street, Jack Degnan.  He was nice enough to send me a photo of his prototype (always cool to see) and tell me how he came up with the game.  In his own words…

Word on the Street was a game idea I had about five years ago.  The original thought was for this to be a card game.  Players would turn over a category and try to use the letter-cards in their hand to try to spell a word that fit the category. It was a little tough and not quite as fun as I thought it would be…but I knew the concept had some potential.  About three years later I pulled it off the shelf and decided to make a board game out of it. The first version was pushing letters toward a finish line and then the idea of tug-of-war ACROSS the board rather than DOWN the board came to me. I wanted to call it Tug-of-Words, but the name was taken so I came up with the street idea. The rest is history.

In truth Jack’s just moonlighting as game inventor, his real job is working at a clinic for HIV research in San Diego.  So success couldn’t have come to a nicer guy.  And to sweeten the deal, this year Out of the Box has introduced a Junior version of the game.  It is a little bit smaller and includes vowels too.   I was a little worried about this at first — what happens when someone captures the E and the A?!  But it wasn’t really an issue (except when some snot played “FREEZER” – and this time it wasn’t me.)

Word on the Street Stats:
~$25 at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Borders
2-10 Players
20-30 Minutes
Ages 12 and up

Word on the Street JUNIOR Stats:
~$20 at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble
2-8 Players
20-30 Minutes (we omitted the use of the timer for this version game – too much pressure on the young ones)
Ages 8 and up

A while back I wrote an article about taking games with you when you travel (see here) and Nate Scheidler, Organizer of Chicago Boardgames Meetup Group, said that he packs a game called Pickomino.  Well, at the time I’d never played Pickomino and although I’d heard of it, I hadn’t heard anything about it.  This is really the reason I started The Game Aisle; I know how hard it is to decide which game to purchase when all you’ve got to go on is the box art.  So when a game junkie like Nate says that he takes Pickomino with him on a trip where he may be stuck playing it over and over, I took that as a pretty good sign.  Now I just had to get my hands on a copy!

Pickomino is a dice and tile game published by Rio Grande Games here in the US which has a knack for finding great German-style family strategy games and publishing them in English for the game-loving American public.  They work closely with the German publishers to ensure the essence of the game is carefully translated into English and have produce such games as Puerto Rico, Carcassonne and Lost Cities.  Haven’t heard of these?  You’ll probably only find them in specialty game stores or on the game shelf of your true “gamer” friends.  Personally, I’m not a huge fan of city building, area control or abstract strategy games and my attention usually wanes after about 20 minutes of playing a game so I’m not a big purchaser of Rio Grande Games (although I have a great deal of respect for what they do).  And from people who like these kinds of games – I hear that Puerto Rico and Lost Cities are AMAZING.  Just FYI.

Back to Pickomino, I don’t feel that it is a typical Rio Grande game EXCEPT its inventor is the prolific German game inventor Reiner Knizia (he also invented Easy Come, Easy Go).  And he’s done a great job of adding in a little strategy and some interesting twists to a familiar-feeling dice game.  The goal of Pickomino is to collect as many roast worms as possible (apparently they are all the rage amongst the chickens).  You do this by rolling eight dice and collecting the highest possible point total — without busting.  The eight dice are numbered 1-5 plus one red worm, which is worth five points.  You bust when you’ve used up all the dice and haven’t rolled at least one worm or you don’t roll any new numbers on your turn.  If you don’t bust on your turn, you collect the tile that is the same number, or the next available one down, from the total you’ve rolled.  (If you don’t roll a high enough number for an available tile, this is also considered a bust.)  The tile will have 1-4 worms on it and the winner is whoever has collected the most worms on their tiles at the end of the game!  There’s also a little bit of stealing and you have to return worms if you bust so there’s a bit going on but it’s easy to grasp and explain to others once you’ve sifted through the directions – which took us two reads, but was well worth the effort.

Ironically, I like this game but I’m terrible at it.  I have the worst rolling luck – yet with it’s great catch-up factor I was able to come back from a 12 worms deficit to win last night!  A little stellar rolling by me and some poor rolling by my opponent and I was back in the game!

The Game Aisle game testers found Pickomino fun with 2 players as well as 4-5 (we didn’t try more than that).   There is a bit of adding so this is a great game to play with kids so they learn quick addition without the assistance of their iPhone’s calculator function!

Pickomino Stats:
~$20-$25 at Amazon.com and specialty game retailers
2 – 7 Players
15-30 Minutes
Ages 8 and up

Earlier this month I was at Richard Gottlieb’s “Future of the Industry” conference and someone brought up the issue of packaging.  Given that “green” is a trend; the absence of throwaway packaging is definitely an a-peel-ing part of Bananagrams.  (Couldn’t resist a good pun!)  While this game feels familiar to other crossword games like Pick Two, we all agreed that the adorable zippered banana sack and the hanging merchandiser helped make this item a standout.

The game itself?  I think it’s great!  (FYI – I really like quick word games.)  The only real negative is that it’s not heavy on the player interaction because you’re working on your own mini-crossword while everyone else is working on theirs.  The other players essentially set the pace of the game.  When they need a new piece, you have to draw one too.  If you need a piece, they select one as well and this continues until all the pieces are gone.

Keeping up is key in this game.  You also need to be flexible; quickly morphing your words to include an unfortunate letter tile is essential.  It’s not easy to squeeze an X or Z into an existing crossword but the faster you can, the less likely you will fall behind.  It’s also advantageous to have a couple open spots to create quick short words like “it” and “am” towards the end of the game.

Bananagrams was first introduced at London Toy Fair in 2006 and has swiftly become a big success.  It’s hard to ignore their booth at toy shows because it is filled with tons of fabric bananas so you just have to stop to find out what’s going on!  And apparently the deluge of bananas has worked because Bananagrams is now stocked in Target, Barnes and Noble and a wide variety of retailers.  So maybe the next time you stop at the store you’ll pick up some bananas – from the game aisle.

Bananagrams Stats:
~$15 at Target, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, local Mom & Pop stores
2- Players
2-5 Minutes
Ages 5 and up

Regardless of how you pronounce the name Rummy-CUBE, Roomi-CUBE, Rummy –CUB, if you’ve played it you probably like it.

Rummikub has to be my favorite two-player game and I’ll admit it took me a long, LONG time to learn to play it.  Wait…let me rephrase, I got it pretty quickly once I read the directions but back when I was young my sister got a copy for Christmas we never bothered learning to play it.  Why?  It’s filled with numbers and it looked like math was involved and after summers and summers of math workbooks forced upon us from my math teacher mother there was NO WAY I was going to spend a minute of my free time with anything that looked like math was directly involved.

Silly me. It’s not a math a game – it’s a rummy game, hence the name.  But in my defense here, the rummy we played was called Shanghai so I really had no idea what rummy was at the time.

So when I finally got around to learning how to play Rummikub I couldn’t believe what I had been missing!  I am now the proud owner of 2 of the over 50 million copies that have been sold since Ephraim Hertzano started hand making copies back in the 1930s.

According to the Rummikub people it’s the bestselling tile game and the third best-selling family game in the world.  So then why am I even bothering to write a review?  Because if you are one of the people who hasn’t played it maybe because you fell into the “oh my God – it’s got numbers, there must be MATH involved” trap I fell into, I feel it is my duty to inform you otherwise.  You use the tiles you’re given (and the ones you draw) to make straights of the same color or groupings of  matching numbers (not of the same color).  But what makes it so cool is you can rearrange the tiles in the playing area to slide in your own tiles just as long as every tile still is apart of a straight or number grouping.  Oh my gosh, it sounds so easy!  And it is.

If you haven’t played, try it.  If you have and don’t like it, I’d keep that to yourself.  A big percentage of that 50 million people really like it and you don’t want to upset the mob.

Rummikub Stats:
~$11 and up at Target, Toys ‘R Us, Amazon.com and tons of other places
2-4 players, I think 2-3 is best – especially if you’re playing with “thinkers”
20-45 minutes (really depends on the players)
Ages 8 and up